Reasons and Confessions

Hello there! I'm going to make a confession straight away and I hope you won't close the page in annoyance. I'm not really called Daisy Brown and that picture isn't really what I look like (unfortunately I don't have Charlotte Bronte's body or a daisy shaped head), so I'm lying just a little bit, but I thought we should start off with a clean slate, or rather, a clean computer screen. Daisy is just a nice name that I think would suit my writing character, because that's what I'm creating here essentially, a character, as we do really whenever we are who we are. So we're all writers of our own lives and whatnot but what I aspire to do is write about other people and other worlds but lately my own world has been getting in the way. After all, locking myself up in my room to write all the time in my first year at Uni wouldn't make me many friends... No, now's not the time for me to be a social recluse. If anything my writing would be worse because I would have no way of learning more about people and would probably end up writing wrist-slitting cringe about why the world doesn't like me and moan - self-pity - moan - moan - groan. Not to say of course that shutting oneself away to write doesn't produce marvellous works of literature for some people. Perhaps I just have less imaginative independence than them because I need people around me to write.

But anyway, it's not easy having the motivation to do something that you want more than anything to do when you're lacking in self-confidence. Those of you that are writers yourselves or have tried to write at any time probably know what I mean. It's the ohh anything I write will be rubbish anyway so why mess up what is a perfectly unmarked piece of paper (or word document) syndrome. When I was thirteen I wrote my first novel in just over a month. Although the standard of it was really nothing to be proud of, I was able to write 120,000 words in that time because I wasn't worried about my writing. I was in the perfect zen state of ignorance to the worth of what I was putting on the page and so could write write write all I liked. I'm told that writing is re-writing anyway, so imagine how wonderful it could be if I could be producing that much of it in so little a time all the time. Eventually I'm bound to re-write something that's good enough. I've tried since and in fact nearly finished my second novel (though that is at the moment on seemingly permanent hold) and am working on another project which I'll tell you about another time because I'm aware that I'm rambling and not getting to the point of why I'm writing this blog.

I am writing this blog because I want to write in spite of all the obstacles that life poses and I think this will give me some motivation. Secondly, I think writing this will make me think more about my writing process and stay focused. Lastly, I want people to read some of the things I write because having an audience might spur me on, but for now only while I hide shyly behind Daisy.

So I hope you will read some of my short stories and poems and I apologise profusely if they are not to your taste. I'll work on it! Maybe we'll even see a development throughout the course of this blog. I hope so anyway.

Putting my pen to paper begins now.